Sunday Reads: Dairy Queen Time

Good Morning

Summer is definitely here.  Hot and lazy, with just a hint of a Dairy Queen old fashioned soft vanilla ice cream chocolate dipped cone. Do they even still make those?

Whatever, things are spinning out of control. Everywhere.

And that means that today’s links are just going to be quick flashed below…like an exhibitionist giving you a thrill for only a second. (And like that flash of skin, you are appalled, but at the same time intrigued. It’s an awful sight, but still you are curious for more.)

Isn’t that what the news is like really? They don’t call those bloody things “teasers” for nothing.

And Fox News is really good at it:

Qatar may prove comfortable quarters for released Guantanamo detainees | Fox News

There has been an outcry from critics of the prisoner swap, who worry that these men with blood on their hands are getting off far too easily. Qatar’s citizens are the richest in the world, per capita, but only a minority of residents here are actually citizens and the Taliban five are not among them.

We do know their families are coming here to live with the former prisoners in some sort of residential compound.

Sources here say they are likely to live in “5 star villas” along with more than a few of their compatriots who are already living in the Qatari capital at the expense of this gas-rich Emirate.

Fox also has been quick with the wordfest on the air, look at this teaser via Mediaite: Fox’s Guilfoyle: Bergdahl ‘Lucky’ U.S. Forces Didn’t Bring Him Home in a Body Bag

Things got heated between Geraldo Rivera and Kimberly Guilfoyle Friday afternoon on Fox News’ Outnumbered as the debate over U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s release by the Taliban raged on. While Rivera maintained that as a U.S. solider, Bergdahl deserved to be brought home alive by any means necessary, Guilfoyle said he was “lucky” that U.S. forces didn’t kill him and bring him home in a body bag.

Speaking about soldiers in the field, Rivera said that “one of the things they take great security in is a absolute maxim that if anything happens to them, they’re going to be brought home, that we will not leave them behind.” He added, “I don’t care who Bergdahl is, we don’t leave him behind.” If the Army starts trying to decide which soldiers are worth saving, then he said “our armed forces will be stripped of what is absolutely the thing that makes them most secure.”

“It seems to me he’s pretty lucky that he was brought home the way he was,” Guilfoyle said, disagreeing with Rivera. “Because if those special forces had found him and encountered him — and they were looking for him — he would have come home either in a body bag or come home and gone straight to jail.” But now instead, Bergdahl is being “celebrated as a hero.”

But there was another teaser headline at Mediaite I just had to click because, well you will see:

GOP Senator Apologizes for Using the Word ‘Midget’ | Mediaite

Oh no…

GOP Senator Under Fire for Scolding ‘Midgets’ in Congress | Mediaite

Wow.  Little people get very upset. But do they call each other “midget?”

Going back to the Bergdahl shit pile for a minute more. This was an interesting link to read at Little Green Footballs: Former CENTCOM Commander Gen. Mattis: No Evidence of Bergdahl Collusion With Taliban

In an interview with the Tampa Tribune, former head of US Central Command Marine Gen. James Mattis says he has “never seen one bit of verified or confirmed evidence” that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl collaborated with the Taliban — but he did see information that “specifically discounted” this allegation.

“I have never seen one bit of verified or confirmed evidence of that,” Mattis said in a phone interview with The Tampa Tribune. “Not one bit. You hear things and it was second- and third-hand.”

Other information “specifically discounted” reports that Bergdahl, captured by the Taliban in June 2009 after leaving his outpost in Afghanistan, was working with his captors, he said. Mattis declined to comment on what that information was because it remains classified.

Another interesting bit of data from this story: the shady right wing group that supplied Fox News with this BREAKING BOMBSHELL SCOOP did not even verify that their source was trustworthy.

Go and read more about the untrustworthy source.

Still no update on the condition of Tracy Morgan, however there have been charges filed.   Man charged in traffic accident that leaves comedian Tracy Morgan in critical condition

Kevin Roper, a 35-year-old Georgia resident who was driving the Wal-Mart truck that struck comedian Tracy Morgan’s limousine early Saturday morning, was charged Saturday with death by auto and assault by auto in connection with the crash, acting Middlesex County Prosecutor Andrew Carey said in a statement.

Roper was expected to surrender to authorities, and he will be held in lieu of $50,000 bail.

Morgan and two others remain in critical condition at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., after a vehicle the actor was traveling in was involved in a five-car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. The accident killed James McNair, 63, a comedian better known by his stage name, Jimmy Mack, who often performed with Morgan.

The other day, while I was taking “Little Shitty” to the vet, there was a live shooting going on at the Forsyth County Courthouse, south of Banjoville in Cumming, Georgia. Turns out the man who went bang, bang, bang was a right wing gun nut. Go figure. /snark.

Georgia Courthouse is shot up by Sovereign Citizen after GOP backs Bundy, Open Carry | Informed Comment

That didn’t take long. The Georgia GOP rushed into law an ‘open carry’ provision in April allowing people to tote around guns in bars and churches (apparently these are felt to be complementary institutions in Georgia) and schools (these are apparently felt to be full of expendable if short people in Georgia).

Then the national GOP and Fox Cable News (the “Josef Goebbels Commemorative Propaganda Division of the American Right Wing”) backed Cliven Bundy in his “sovereign citizen” claims that he doesn’t have to pay Federal grazing fees.

So on Saturday a sovereign citizen and former Transportation Department employee (who made his money from the Federal government he hates) showed up outside a Georgia courthouse armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and other munitions and with the clear intent of taking hostages inside the courthouse. He was open carrying, you see, and standing up against big government. Or rather standing overtop it with a gun to its head.

This was a clear act of terrorism, but since it was committed by a white person, no one brought the word up.

Thank you Juan Cole for for saying the “T” word there. Granted…no one at FoxNews will be giving it up. But hey, a father who does not shave as a form of support while his son is held as a prisoner of war…that guy is a Muslim…code word terrorist. (via Bill O’Reilly.)

I really want you to go and read the rest of that Cole post. As someone mentioned in the comments on that link, the “shooter” had several explosives at his home too. Imagine what could have happened.

More on this shooting here:

Police: Suspect in Cumming shooting made supply list | AccessNorthGa

The man who police say staged an assault on the Forsyth County Courthouse carefully planned the weapons and supplies he would need to enter the building and harm people inside, authorities said Saturday as they sought to explain why Dennis Marx opened fire outside the building, wounding one deputy before dying in a shootout.

Police said they found a checklist at Marx’s home in Cumming that matched the items inside the rented silver Nissan SUV used in Friday’s mid-morning attack. Marx had a number of bags and buckets holding homemade and commercial explosive devices that could be clipped to hostages; a gas mask; two handguns; zip ties and two bulletproof vests, police said. They said Marx, 48, wore one of the vests and clipped a hand grenade and wire to himself as a booby trap.

“All the items were checked off,” Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Doug Rainwater said. “So this was a very deliberate planned assault on the Forsyth County courthouse.”

Next up, another terrorist, at least in my opinion…can you believe it has been a year: ORLANDO, Fla.: One year later, where are players in George Zimmerman trial?

See, you want to click it. And yet…you don’t want to click it. Am I right?

Did y’all see the CIA is officially in the tweet business.

As sinister dealers in mass death, the CIA could at least spare us its snarky tweets | PandoDaily

Intelligence analysts at the CIA’s Open Source Center have been sifting through 5 million tweets a day since at least 2011. So it was inevitable that the agency would want to join Twitter itself.

The spooks’ first tweet, issued yesterday, on the 70^th anniversary of D-Day (I can neither confirm nor deny that the timing means anything), made news for its self-aware sense of humor:

Funny, we think they are funny….funny how like they amuse us?

The CIA has joined Twitter with the best first tweet possible

Amnesty International is less amused. “The CIA’s first Tweet would be funny if it weren’t for the agency’s use of torture and extrajudicial executions,” says program director Zeke Johnson. “They should put as least as much effort into following the law as they do into social media. The full truth about the CIA torture and drone strikes should be made made public immediately and those responsible for crimes held accountable.” The agency is supposed to be close to declassifying a report on its “enhanced interrogation” program, with a release planned on or around July 4th.

Mmmm.

Here we go again. Another blatant case of Affluenza: ​Billionaire Sexually Assaults Stepdaughter, Gets Four Months in Jail

Affluenza strikes yet again.

Samuel Curtis Johnson III is the heir to the SC Johnson & Son company (a family company), you know the people that bring you brands like Ziploc, Windex, Saran, Pledge, and other standard household cleaning products, so he’s doing pretty well for himself. Well not really. At all.

In 2011, Johnson faced felony charges for sexual assault of a child, for inappropriately touching his stepdaughter, starting from when she was age 12 to when she was 15 years old. The charges arose from statements Johnson made to his therapist in Arizona, who was required by law to report child abuse. While the charge could have sent him to prison for 40 years, he was sentenced to four months and will only be serving at least 60 days and paying a fine of $6,000. See, despite confessing to his assault, the girl, could not testify against him because she and her mother refused to have her medical records released to confirm the girl reporting the abuse to the her therapist to corroborate her testimony, something that was highly disputed, ruled on, reversed, and then ruled upon again.

As Aviva Shen at Think Progress points out, sexual assault victims’ “refusal to cooperate” keeps their attackers off the hook, but circumstances are hardly cut and dry. In this situation, prosecutors pointed out that neither the girl nor the mother wanted to press charges against the billionaire tycoon (the girl, who wanted the case to be dismissed, had moved to North Carolina and fought legal efforts to make her come to Wisconsin to testify), as they could be socially and financially dependent on him. I can’t fully blame the now 17-year-old girl for simply wanting to put this behind her.

Johnson ended up pleading guilty to two misdemeanors (fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct) instead of the felony charge.

Silence. Nothing else I can say.

Digby has a little preview of an interview Hillary is giving soon with Diane Sawyer: Hullabaloo

Via John Amato:

Diane Sawyer: And what would you say to Karl Rove about your brain?

Clinton: (laughs) That I know he was called “Bush’s Brain” in one of the books written about him, and I wish him well.

Bada-bing!

Damn. I love that woman. (Clinton.)

Now a couple last links dealing with Women and Film.

Why Women in Film Matter | Vivian Norris

For anyone who has spent any time in and around Hollywood, it is impossible to ignore the male-dominated industry and its sexist standards. I recently saw a great Swedish documentary on the life of actress Ann Margret, in which she says how hard Hollywood on women. Her face betrayed the reality of what are both expected and what many women must do to survive and thrive within the difficult world of female objectification. And this from an actress who is considered to be a “success,” but whom also suffered from her time in Hollywood.

Many of us know women who have encountered extreme difficulties even shamefully horrific realities of what it means to try to get one’s foot in the door based on talent alone. And when it comes to women directors, the doors have not only remain closed for the most part, they have been cruelly pushing aside even those women who should be given the chance to direct large budget features as they have proven themselves time and again that they can draw in audiences with their work.

And here, a portrait of Cathy O’Donnell by Martha Holme (original and colorized) « Kinoimages.com

Actress Cathy O’Donnell working on her poetry, 1945, photo by Martha Holme. You know her from “They Live by Night”, “Side Street” and “The Best Years of Our Lives”. Original and colorized.

For a little background on Cathy O’Donnell:

She was in Alabama until age 12, Ann Steely attended high school and college in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, then worked as a stenographer to finance a trip to Hollywood, where fortune favored her with a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer under Samuel Goldwyn. Recognizing her talent and appeal through a thick Southern accent, Goldwyn arranged rigorous voice & theatrical training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and elsewhere, gave her an Irish-sounding stage name & cast her in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). This film’s success boded well for Cathy’s career, and soon she was starred in the now-classic They Live by Night (1948). However, her rise in films was checked when, on Sunday, April 11th, 1948, at age 23, she married 48-year-old Robert Wyler, older brother of famous M-G-M director, William Wyler, with whom Goldwyn was feuding. The irate Goldwyn abruptly canceled her contract; thereafter she had no lasting association with any studio or producer.

Talk about a career being killed because she got married to the wrong man.  TCM will be having a couple of her films latter this month, be sure to check out the schedule here.

That is all for today. Enjoy your summer Sunday, and please share your thoughts below in the comments section.